Guidelines Applicable to Health Care and Child Protective Services for Infants with Life-Threatening Congenital Impairments Pursuant to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (draft)
Contributor(s):
United States Department of Health and Human Services
In response to the "Baby Doe" controversy triggered by the deliberate withholding of medical treatment from a severely disabled newborn in an Indiana hospital, and his resulting death, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed new guidelines for health care providers in order to prevent further deaths of this kind. The guidelines, which went through several revisions, were controversial among department officials because they limited the professional autonomy of physicians to make decisions about treatment. They were eventually struck down by the courts for the same reason. As a long-time surgeon but also a firm believer in the medical rights of disabled newborns, Koop supported the guidelines only reluctantly, fearing at the same time that they intruded too far into the relationship between physicians and parents and lacked the moral authority of law. For Koop, resolving the controversy over the rights of physicians and parents to determine the fate of disabled newborns required that physicians undergo continuing medical education in the latest surgical techniques to correct birth defects. Above all, it required ongoing moral self-examination among health care providers, which Koop considered too often missing in contemporary medicine.. NOTE: In the original document, page 4 is repeated, once with handwritten notes, and once without.
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